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Little Old Lady Investigates: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"Policemen asking questions are being policemen, but little old ladies asking questions are just being [[Obfuscating Stupidity|little old ladies]]."''
|'''Miss Marple'''
There's a subgenre of [[Mystery Fiction]] called "Cozy Mysteries", a prevalent trope of which is the little old lady investigator. She is an older lady, usually retired, usually a [[Cool Old Lady]], who has a knack for solving mysteries and who is [[Always Murder|always solving murders]] [[Busman's Holiday|wherever she goes.]] She's usually an [[Amateur Sleuth]], but occasionally she works for an agency or is a registered [[Private Detective|PI]]. The fact that people seem to keep dropping dead around her often makes her a [[Mystery Magnet]]. This sub-genre is also known as the "tea cozy mystery".
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* [[Agatha Christie]]'s [[Miss Marple]] is the [[Trope Codifier]]. In one book she explains her success like this: "Policemen asking questions are being policemen, but little old ladies asking questions are just being little old ladies."
** Dame Agatha's Tuppence Beresford of the [[Tommy and Tuppence]] books uses many aspects of the Little Old Lady Investigates, but isn't a pure version because she prefers to work on instinct, has a partner in her husband Tommy, and often works under the auspices of an official branch of the government. In ''N or M?'', though, she essentially plays this straight while undercover as a doddering housewife and acting essentially as an independent agent.
* [[Dorothy Gilman]]'s [[Mrs. Pollifax (franchise)|Mrs. Pollifax]] is a little old lady investigative ''[[CIA]] agent''. It's a bit more believable when you learn that she was originally hired by the CIA as a decoy courier by accident when her file was inadvertently placed in the "people we can use for this decoy run" stack instead of the "people we've reviewed and rejected" stack, but her [[Nosy Neighbor]] and [[Weirdness Magnet]] tendencies, combined with a very no-nonsense common-sense approach to whatever trouble she landed in<ref>Not to mention her karate training.</ref>, led her into more and more active assignments—this while still being essentially a part-timer who works for the CIA to keep her retirement years from being boring.
** There's been two movies made featuring Mrs. Pollifax
** Mrs. Pollifax isn't quite the normal little old lady either, as witnessed by the not more closely described "karate chop", which she delivers to many a foe, who is [[Tap on the Head|invariably rendered unconscious]].
* [[Dorothy Gilman]] also wrote a novel entitled ''The Clairvoyant Countess''. The title character, Madame Marina Karitska, is Russian and uh, clairvoyant. Her talent leads her into many investigations with a member of the police department Detective Lieutenant Pruden.
* Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley (later Dame Beatrice Bradley). [[Justified Trope]] in that she was a psychoanalyst and had legitimate Home Office recognition.
* Dave Stone parodied this trope in his 1997 [[Virgin New Adventures]] novel ''Ship of Fools'' with the character of Agatha Magpole. The [[Mystery Magnet|inexplicably high rate]] of murders that occur when this little old lady is around turn out to be caused by {{spoiler|her extremely powerful, yet subconscious, psychic abilities, which drive people to homicide}}.
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* Miss Climpson, the chatty, ''knitting'', ''deeply religious'' old lady who works for [[Lord Peter Wimsey]], gathering information in places he can't go without ''arousing suspicion''!!
** And ''yes'', [[Bold Inflation|THIS]] is how the '''character''' ''talks and writes''!
* [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[
* [[Deconstructed]] brutally in the short story "Granny Gumption Solves a Murder" from ''100 Dastardly Little Detective Stories''. The titular Granny Gumption does indeed solve a murder, and confronts the murderer [[Idiot Ball|in his own home]], [[What an Idiot!|without any witnesses]]—and ''[[Have You Told Anyone Else?|mentions that she didn't tell anyone else that she figured out the truth]].'' {{spoiler|Needless to say, she becomes his next murder victim in an excruciatingly brutal death scene that starts with a broken jaw and [[Eye Scream]] and [[It Got Worse|just gets worse]] from there}}.
** You can read this vicious little story [http://www.cjhenderson.com/docs/GRANNY.pdf here]{{dead link}} if you like. (Note: link goes to PDF file.)
* ''[[The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency]]'': Precious Ramotswe falls squarely into this category, despite the fact that she rarely solves murders, isn't all that old and is hardly little in the waist department.
** The same goes for another of Alexander McCall Smith's heroines, Isabel Dalhousie of ''The Sunday Philosophy Club''. Isabel is only in her forties, though, but is definitely nosy enough. One review has even described it in terms of tea and coziness.
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